Civilizations inevitably have a rise, a golden age, and a fall.  The most famous documented in literature is the story of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476, as Odoacer of the Goths determined to remove the last vestiges of the seats of power of the empire from its thousand year presence in the capital Rome.  Odoacer did not have to achieve a massive battle conquest; the empire’s rulers had fundamentally run out of people willing to die trying to defend its reason for being,   A vast core set of shared societal principles that had led to the dominance, greatness, and expanse of the empire over hundreds of years, and immunity to periods of unstable and incompetent leaders,  had eroded to a point of imperceptibility.   Citizens living among great citadels and shrines to the past had no residual perspective of how they came to be, or why they should be maintained.  It simply took a gentle but concerted push to turn the whole rotten edifice over.  We are left only with the fragile ruins and the distant echoes of what stood before the civilization grew tired of itself.

Perhaps our modern American civilization is in the initial stages of a similar coming collapse.  The last four years in America have presaged our current anarchy in the streets with a pattern of anarchic actions of our elite institutions against the very foundational principles of a representative democracy based upon their singular hatred of the uncouth ‘barbarian” elected to lead the country and the archaic reactionary impulses  he felt he was elected to enact.  The President has bludgeoned the elites usual means of dominance they have built up over decades  organized around coordinated communication of  prescribed narratives, bureaucratic indifference to the affected, closing of diversity of thought in the educational academy, and the instillment of conflict of interests between societal groups to best leverage their subservience.   The President has proved a particularly difficult opponent in that he uses no accumulated intellectual principles to respond.  Admittedly proud of having written more books than he has read, President Trump instead relies on  animalistic instincts based upon visual cues and gut reaction he gains from the crowds of supporters that embrace him.  It has left him exposed to the highest level of outrage and hatred from those whose righteousness can not accept someone so impervious to their pressures.  The result has been an unceasing effort to destroy Trump and the dangerous contrarian voices he energizes.  The war to destroy has been from the first moment he showed political traction, and the combined power of all the elite institutions have worked to crush him.

Taking advantage of his naive understanding of politics, his opposition, the Clinton campaign,  worked with the entrenched bureaucracy to inject a narrative of treasonous actions into the political bloodstream.  Working with allies in the press and higher ups in the Obama administration,  a false and ludicrous narrative was built through opposition research to suggest a Russian influence in the Trump campaign that wasn’t there, and then married it through to a nefarious and coordinated  campaign by the Obama administration, emboldened by concocted fraudulent FISA court documents, to spy upon multiple Trump  campaign officials, including likely, the candidate himself.  This criminal action sought to undermine a democratic election, and failing that, evolved into a doubled down process attacking every facet of the Trump administration through a false collusion narrative corruptly supported by the FBI, sustained doggedly by an adversarial press, injected with steroids by a two year special prosecutor farce, and finally, when that failed,  a final move in for the kill through a “whistleblower” linking routine Trump loose talk to a crash  impeachment and attempted removal.  To their stunned surprise, the Kraken remained standing, and, given the bountiful economy, an even more formidable opponent for the next election.

Then came the economic gift from the gods of retribution, the Wuhan virus.  Powerless to stop the worldwide pandemic, Trump panicked under enormous pressure from elite ‘experts’  and closed down the economy to prevent spread.  Cratering the recovery of the most wide spread distribution of individual economic success in the past sixty years in the world’s largest economy, the actions simultaneously allowed opposition leaders to strengthen and fortify the damage by top down arbitrary and ruthlessly efficient lock downs.  Month after month the definition of ‘non-essential’ was expanded to assure devastating destruction of private enterprise and enhance opportunities for further government and elite dependence on basic survival.  When the societal stresses grew great, the brew was ripe for an eruption, and the powder keg went off with the Minneapolis police arrest and obscene killing of a black male, viewed by the whole nation.  The perfect storm of a presumptive hate crime and a massively restless population from the lockdown led to mass looting and destruction.  The police, being the very symbol of oppression and societal  racial sin evidenced  in the crime, were powerless to respond, and their large city democrat bosses took advantage in stoking the flames of hatred and unrest.  Soon a coordinated effort to allow anarchists to stoke the chaos, feed by unseen hands of guidance and financial means, swept across the country and world, subsuming the initial protests’ righteous clarity and purpose, and injected a darker and more sustained streak of premeditated societal breakdown and chaos.

Here we stand.  Were Trump to somehow achieve a miraculous escape from the trap set for him and win the coming election, one most assuredly is looking at a logarithmic expansion of the virulent and violent response to his very existence as President.  If the democrats  succeed in the sustained effort to destroy Trump and are rewarded for their four year criminal and unprecedented effort to eliminate an opponent, their reward will be achieved on the backs of radical elements that seek to destroy the foundations of the republic and replace it with their own authoritarian vision.  Either way,  the seeds of civilizational collapse are deeply planted in the fallows.

Societies inevitably require a certain set of shared values, and this society is increasingly seeing such shared values rent asunder. The majority of people who understood the history of the republic, the challenges it faced, and the triumphant overcoming of its flaws time and time again predicated upon the tenets of its founding as the ultimate unifier, are rapidly being replaced with generations who orient opinions on feelings and emotions, not rationally objective principle and truth.  Are there enough of us to pull it all back from the abyss?

The ancient Romans who cared about civilization are reaching across the mists of time to say, sustain, sustain, or soon become the past.